Large anomalous Hall effect in a half-Heusler antiferromagnet

The quantum mechanical (Berry) phase of the electronic wavefunction plays a critical role in the anomalous and spin Hall effects, including their quantized limits. While progress has been made in understanding these effects in ferromagnets, less is known in antiferromagnetic systems. Here we present a study of antiferromagnet GdPtBi, whose electronic structure is similar to that of the topologically non-trivial HgTe (refs 9-11), and where the Gd ions offer the possibility to tune the Berry phase via control of the spin texture. We show that this system supports an anomalous Hall angle Θ AH > 0.1, comparable to the largest observed in bulk ferromagnets and significantly larger than in other antiferromagnets. Neutron scattering measurements and electronic structure calculations suggest that this effect originates from avoided crossing or Weyl points that develop near the Fermi level due to a breaking of combined time-reversal and lattice symmetries. Berry phase effects associated with such symmetry breaking have recently been explored in kagome networks; our results extend this to half-Heusler systems with non-trivial band topology. The magnetic textures indicated here may also provide pathways towards realizing the topological insulating and semimetallic states predicted in this material class. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.